Yahoo

Panel to celebrate 20 years of IP communications/VoIP and discuss its future.

Next week at the 29th ITEXPO, I get the pleasure of moderating a panel with some super heavy hitters in the world of communications.

Craig Walker is the man behind Dialpad Communications – the dotcom sensation as well as GrandCentral Communications and UberConference. Basically, he was responsible for the communications systems Yahoo! and Google provide us today and more.

You may have heard that Popular Science has shut down its comments citing studies which show comments can influence the readers perception of a story.

Specifically:

Another, similarly designed study found that just firmly worded (but not uncivil) disagreements between commenters impacted readers' perception of science.
If you carry out those results to their logical end--commenters shape public opinion; public opinion shapes public policy; public policy shapes how and whether and what research gets funded--you start to see why we feel compelled to hit the "off" switch.

They go on by explaining there are still lots of ways to interact with the company – social media, etc. Response from readers was mixed and to me it seems that shutting down comments is a bit like soft-censorship; people will still comment on the content but much of it will be hidden from readers.

The contact center is a billion dollar channel but has yet to exploit its true potential. Contact center data can now drive demand through another channel, online. To drive brand and business equity today, marketers must leverage consumer insights to create seamless experiences across channels where each interaction, regardless of channel, is relevant and consistent to lead consumers along the path to purchase.

In the late nineties it was fashionable to say the web would kill the contact center as people would no longer need to speak on the phone when purchasing.

If you haven’t checked out the TMCnet feature by Josh Alexander about companies Yahoo! should purchase, please do… I’ll wait. Ok – now that you’re back – isn’t this guy funny? It isn’t too often I read an article about tech where I learn things and also laugh out loud.

There is an insatiable demand for content of the video variety. It is so great in fact that sports networks like ESPN are getting an outsized portion of your cable bill. The network in fact gets more than $5 per subscriber per month regardless of whether you ever watch their networks. Cable and IPTV companies for their part are in quite a pickle as more subscribers drop their service altogether for OTT competition.

It took six months but Yahoo! decided its Livestand newsreader will no longer be offered. Apparently the competition from Google Currents, Zite and Flipboard was too much.

I mentioned this past December that the Livestand user interface was clunky and I suppose this is what did the product in. That of course and being late to the party and seeing superior competition from Google - whose interface is better.

Think about it though - Yahoo has virtually infinite marketing real estate avaialble to it and could have made this product a success. Perhaps they decided its new Axis browser is more strategic and a better place to focus on.

Interestingly I just checked out the Yahoo blog post on the matter and they confirmed my suspicions.

Yahoo has taken the mobile browser and improved it dramatically by integrating search and allowing users to view results rapidly without the need to open page after page. While Google allows similar functionality on a desktop what Yahoo! has done here is put the results of browsing up top where they should be. And with the simple swipe of a finger a user can scroll through pages after page to see the site they are looking for.

If you take the best parts of Google Instant and the now defunct visual SearchMe bowser and put them together with some added features you get Yahoo’s Axis.

How self-destructive US policies are hurting hiring and industry
One of the biggest concerns regarding the passage of SOPA is that entire domain names could be blocked by federal authorities due to a single offending blog or web page. In this past week, major websites such as Wikipedia and Google engaged in an education campaign in order to have consumers put pressure on politicians who eventually reversed course on their support of the bill.

On a side note – as a conservative – the fact that a Republican, Representative Lamar Smith was the biggest proponent of this bill is horrifying. He should be thrown out of office by his constituents at the first possible chance.

Moreover, any politician who ever supported the bill should suffer the same fate.

But what is even scarier than theoretical web takedowns is actual ones and this week we saw Megaupload removed from the web because it allegedly engaged in activities which promoted pirating copyrighted material. Now if you aren’t a user of the site – and I never have been to my knowledge, you may be led to believe the US government was in its rights to take down a site designed solely to break the law.

But the challenge here is there are many users who used Megaupload for legitimate uses like sharing and storing files.

As reported on TMCnet yesterday, Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo! has stepped down from the board to pursue other interests. We have a great deal to thank Yang for – as the first company to categorize the web and build out many free services, society has benefit greatly from what Yahoo has more or less given away for free. That is the positive – the negative is the company has eroded top management and investor confidence for many years. Not to mention the botched Microsoft acquisition some years back at a valuation more than double what the company is worth now.

Yahoo introduced news sharing on Facebook three months ago and will now roll out sharing to 26 other parts of its site including its omg entertainment news, television, movies and games. According to the AP few people are opting to share their Yahoo! activities on Facebook. In fact the article relays that Yahoo! has said 12 million out of 700 million have chosen to do so.